In response to my article, “Gold confiscation: It depends on what gold, and how much,” someone posted a link to this video, by Mike Maloney of GoldSilver.com.
In it, Maloney makes one false statement, and one misleading one.
1) “They took it and they put it all in one place owned by the government, so it was nationalized.”
False. It was given to the illegal privately owned Federal Reserve banking cartel.
2) He says that people were compensated for the gold that was taken from them, which is true, and I mentioned that in my article. However, it was taken at the figurative point of a gun at $20.67, only for the price to be unilaterally raised half a year later to $35 an ounce. I argue that’s a violation of the 5th amendment protection of “just compensation” for the taking of private property, on two fronts. 1) A 60% unilateral increase in half a year isn’t just and 2) It wasn’t taken for public use, but for use by the illegal privately owned Federal Reserve banking cartel.
Additionally, he claims that the there was no confiscation of gold, saying that confiscate means to take without compensation.
From Merriam-Webster’s Online dictionary, confiscation is defined with the entry confiscate, as:
1. to seize as forfeited to the public treasury
2. to seize or as if by authority
Definition 1 doesn’t apply in this case, since the gold had to be turned over the illegal privately owned Federal Reserve banking cartel, and not the public treasury.
Definition 2 applies, and mentions nothing about it being seized without compensation. Indeed, the gold was seized, by the figurative barrel of a gun, backed by criminal penalties, as outlined in FDR’s Executive Order 6102.
Your assessment of Maloney’s comments are misleading. While EO6102 and EO6260, which replaced it, did require people to turn in their gold to the Fed Banks, The Gold Reserve Act of 1934 required the Fed Banks to turn the gold over to the ownership of the US Dept. of the Treasury. So, Maloney was right. The effective nationalization of the people’s gold was carried out by Federal Reserve Bank proxy. The US government used the people’s perception of the Fed being “non-governmental”, and the ruse of there being a “national emergency in banking”, and the accusation that people were hoarding gold meant for circulation when they were holding gold coin to protect their personal wealth during the Depression, to hide the fact they were forcibly (by penalty of fine or imprisonment) seizing gold owned by the people of the US. That is the complete story. The US government stole the wealth of the people and used the Federal Reserve to do its dirty work.
The Gold Confiscation of 1933 is the single most draconian economic act in the history of the United States!
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Great article. Many gold owners need to really understand what actually happened back in 33. I have heard people who were alive then say that they turned their gold over to “help the government” which people really wanted to do–but in reality they only helped the Private bank of the Fed.
Since they could actually count on the US dollar to be backed by the slow rising price and Bretton Woods from 1933-73, it really wasn’t that big of a deal. But when Nixon broke free from the $35.00 an Oz backing, gold began to soar almost immediately to $100.00 and Oz. and then on up from there, which proves what everyone already knew, and that was they had over-extended the backing if a rare metal beyond what the gold standard was capable of handling.
Gold is NOT an elastic backing to accommodate continual growth in modern economies. Silver backing helps this deficiency by providing another metal, but this too is faulty and does not necessarily reflect the entire GDP growth in other markets.